


Divine Comedies (and Errors)

by Elizabeth_Woodville



Series: The Winchester Gospel [4]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: Anachronistic Dialogue, Angels Being Tools, Gabriel Being A Meme, Gabriel Being Gabriel, Misuse of Religion and Mythology for Plot Purposes, Origin Stories, Sweden I'm Sorry, This is all kinda experimental. Mostly Improv, mentions of drug use, still a work in progress
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-16
Updated: 2018-07-16
Packaged: 2019-06-11 10:09:57
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,142
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15313233
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Elizabeth_Woodville/pseuds/Elizabeth_Woodville
Summary: A story nobody wanted or cared for. But Gabriel was happy to oblige anyway.





	Divine Comedies (and Errors)

**Author's Note:**

> This is probably shit. But hit me up with some feedback! Positive or negative, I'm not picky.  
> Shoutout to my unofficial amateur beta. The Sam to my Dean, my angsty little sister who constantly reads my shit and bitches about my mistakes and is somehow encouraging about it.  
> Bitch.

 

In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters.

The Spirit of God was already having a bit of an identity crisis. What was his name? What did he look like? The concepts of gender and race and sex and sexuality hadn’t been conceived yet. And God kind of hated the human checkboxes he had to file himself under. He couldn’t even decide on a name or appearance.

In the end, he just strung a bunch of unpronounceable letter sounds together. It worked so well, the Jews never could figure out how to say his name.

But any way, the Spirit of God was just getting started. And it was kind of getting hard to see his creations, so he decided just to keep improvising.

And God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light. God saw that the light was good, and he separated the light from the darkness. God called the light “day,” and the darkness he called “night.” And there was evening, and there was morning—the first day.

And God said, “Let there be a vault between the waters to separate water from water.” 

God was pretty wasted by this point. Who the fuck knows what he meant by that. But there was a day and night now, so I guess that was it for the second day.

And God said, “Let the water under the sky be gathered to one place, and let dry ground appear.” And it was so. God called the dry ground “land,” and the gathered waters he called “seas.” And God saw that it was good.

It was good, but God wasn’t really good at naming things.

Then God said, “Let the land produce vegetation: seed-bearing plants and trees on the land that bear fruit with seed in it, according to their various kinds.” And it was so. And God said, “Damn, there’s probably enough trees to sustain the planet for a billion years. I sure hope nothing comes along and fucks up this perfectly good environment.”

He felt pretty productive on that third day.

Day Four’s where it gets a little weird.

You see, that’s where we come into the picture.

Well, not you, per say. As in the Celestial Beings, the Heavenly Host, the Angels.

The Archangels were basically the world's first, and, unfortunately not last, boy band. 

 

Michael, Lucifer, Raphael, and Gabriel.

Or, as Gabe rechristened them: Posh, Scary, Sporty, and Baby. He wasn't quite sure who Ginger Spice was. 

Any way, the angels immediately imprinted on Dad like lost baby ducks.

Although, baby ducks weren’t invented until Day Five. But the idea still stands.

A whole metric fuckton of little worms and bacteria and phytoplankton and shit like that came on Day Five.

The thing the Good Book doesn’t tell you is that there were approximately 200,000 years between Day Four and Day Five.

And somewhere around 11:59 p.m. on Day Five did God create his greatest creation.

God was pretty damn tired and not really thinking straight when he watched the fish start to throw themselves on the beaches like the Allied Troops at Normandy. Which, hadn’t happened yet, in case you’re an idiot who can’t understand anachronisms and metaphors.

But God watched in awe as the fish grew and changed and shifted, teaching themselves how to walk and communicate and live a fulfilled and purposeful life. How to find food, how to hunt and scavenge, how to compete for survival.

Unfortunately, these majestic creatures, these dinosaurs, as you know them were eradicated. Fucking meteors, always fucking everything up.

So by the time it was 11:59 on Day Six, all God had to show for it were a host of divine minions, some phytoplankton, and the concept of day and night. So, like any high schooler pulling an all nighter on a book report they never read, God decided to just chuck it in the Fuck-It Bucket and see what happened.

What happened was a little gray fish crawling onto the shorelines.

God hadn’t thought up Aquaman yet, so he decided to name him Adam.

Adam was like any other thing you pick up at a pet store: smelly, awkward, and he lived about as long as a goldfish does.

But he, like Microsoft, was pretty cool for the time being.

Adam is where everything went to shit.

Adam was horny and desperate for attention.

Eve probably wouldn’t have been such a problem if Adam wasn’t such an idiot.

And then there’s Lucifer.

He’s a problem.

_So am I,_ thought Gabriel. _but that’s a story for another day._

Lucifer was always a dick. So were Raphael and Michael. It tended to run in the family. You know. Ruining people, fucking things up. The ORIGINAL Family Business, thank you very much.

“Father,” quoth Lucifer, the Morningstar and Bringer of Light. “This is a literally the worst idea you’ve had all week. You can do better than this fucking trash.”

“Nuh-uh,” quoth Michael the Archangel.

“Uh-huh.”

“Nuh-uh.”

“Uh---”

God rubbed his temple. “Lucifer, go to your room.”

Lucifer put his headphones on. “I can’t hear you.”

“Lucifer….”

Lucifer started singing.

“I’m gonna count to three…”

One.

Two…

Three.

And--

“Change of plans,” God said. “Go to Hell.”

“What the hell is Hell?” quoth Lucifer.

“I’m not quite sure yet,” God replied. “But it sucks ass. And you’ll have to spend eternity with Richard Nixon and Jeffrey Dahmer and Genghis Khan, and there’s fire and brimstone and the only song that can play is _Cotton-Eyed Joe._ “

Lucifer flipped him off and stormed off to the basement.

Thus was the Fall of Man. Thus was the Fall of Lucifer, who fell from God and Grace to become a symbol for everything wrong with mankind.

It made humankind look better, for the time being.

Kind of put Gabriel in an uncomfortable position though.

The position of family delinquent.

Those weird family archetypes all originated with celestial beings. The Greeks, the Romans, the Norse, the Hindu. They all had the same placemats at the family table. The wine moms, the vodka aunt, the gay cousin, the bitchy older sister who does everything better than you, the distant relative we don’t talk about, that one weird neighbor kid who camps out in the front yard and eats mayonnaise straight out of the jar.

After Lucifer, Gabriel decided: Fuck it. He’d test his limits.

He wasn’t like Lucifer, who took the family business, salted it, burned it and put it in a paper shredder, throwing it into the Pacific from a World War Two bomber, flower-girl style.

He wasn’t Michael, who lived and breathed for Daddy Dearest, who had this strict and rigid code of morality, this black and white outlook. Michael only understood right and wrong, and stood his ground and was prepared for the end of time from the time that time began. Michael, the family Superman, the boy scout on crack.

He wasn’t Raphael. Thank the Lord. Raphael was the angelic personification of a stick shoved up someone’s ass. He was so tight, you could get diamonds out of coal in under an hour.

Gabriel was just…. Gabriel.  

He just went about his business. Sometimes he’d take a break and go fuck around with the Babylonians. Sometimes he’d kickstart the Opiate Wars. Sometimes he’d go on missions for Dad. Running back and forth to Saudi Arabia to play telephone with Muhammad. Getting to be the guy who told the Virgin Mary that she was knocked up. That was a wild one.

It was simultaneously a very eventful and boring existence.

Babysitting humanity was pretty much a full-time job. And it was one job that Gabriel was thoroughly uninterested in.

Truth be told, by the time the Crusades rolled around, 75% of the angels felt the same way Lucifer had: thoroughly disenchanted with humans. An additional 24% were added into the equation by the time the Old World discovered the New.

By the time the Apocalypse rolled around five hundred plus years later, the angels just started taking claims and throwing knives. They never really cared for humans.

And even worse, they'd unionized. They wanted health care and life insurance and two weeks paid vacation.

I mean what did they think this was? Canada?

Gabriel found the humans entertaining. These teeny little fuckers, who think they’re such hot shit. And what for? For being bloodthirsty, pernicious, violent and tempermental. They were naked mole rats compared to the angels.

But he really did admire their chutzpah. Usually, if you stomp on an ant, it’ll die. But humans weren’t ants, despite what Michael and Lucifer might think.

Fucking cockroaches, they were. Anyway you slice and dice ‘em, and they just kept on swinging.

The Black Death. Nameless civil wars, genocides. Genghis Khan’s Mongolian Barbeque.

Say what you will about religion and evolution, but the fittest were certainly surviving.

He just wasn’t quite sure if that was good or bad.

Later on, he’d realize that the Cockroach Theory was really just an elaborate metaphor for the existence of one Sam and Dean Winchester. Nobody was quite sure what the hell they were doing, and nobody was quite sure how they lived to tell the tale, and yet….

Hell, maybe it was all just an elaborate metaphor for Michael and Lucifer. For Cain and Abel. And every other set of shitty biblical brothers, for every time mankind turned on itself, brother against brother.

And in the end, nothing was ever really accomplished. Sometimes men died, sometimes they lived. Who gives a shit. The conflict was still, evidently, an ongoing problem.  

Gabriel figured everybody’s got a purpose. Michael’s purpose was to be a model citizen. Raphael’s was to be a prick. Lucifer’s was to fuck shit up.

His purpose, as it was, was to live life just for the hell of it.

Hedonism was Gabriel’s middle name. Or maybe his last name. He didn’t really care. Why sit around and think about it when you can live it up, right?

Shacking up with half the Greek pantheon. Running with wild horses through Arabia. Nearly being decapitated to please the Aztec gods. Skinny dipping in the Nile.

Yeah, he thought. Life was good.

⛥⛥⛥

Family gatherings were always a bit of a hassle.

“Gabriel,” Michael was saying. “Your…. Caliber, as of late, has been out of line. We’re concerned that it’s affecting your duties---”

“Wait what? I wasn’t listening.”

Michael pursed his lips.

Zachariah looked up intently. “He’s saying you need to stop coming to family events under the influence.”

“If Dad didn’t want me getting high, why’d he invent it?”

Zachariah scoffed, and Michael narrowed his eyes. “Gabriel, please.”

“It’s actually rather enlightening,” Gabriel said. “John Lennon did drugs. John Lennon would _never_ steer me wrong.”

Raphael rolled his eyes in disgust.  “Jesus Christ.”

“The Beatles were bigger than Jesus, Raph,” Gabriel drawled. “You should know that. You were there.”

“It’s 1732 on Earth, Gabriel.”

“My point still stands. After all, he was the walrus.”

“You’re an imbecile.”

“Name one time John Lennon did me wrong.”

“Yoko.”

“Fuck.”

Zachariah actually snorted. Stupid, cocky son of a bitch.

Gabriel was suddenly tired of fucking around. “Dad wouldn’t have given me this job if he didn’t think I could handle it, okay?”

“I don’t know,” Uriel said suddenly. “He gave the job to Lucifer, didn’t he?”

“Uriel,” Michael snapped, a dark light in his vessel’s blue eyes.

It was an unwritten rule: _never_ speak of the Fallen One. Especially in Michael’s presence.

It got remarkably silent after that.

⛥⛥⛥

_Gållivare, Sweden, 1943_

The world might actually fall apart this time, Implode, collapse in onto itself.

Hell, maybe it already had.

Europe was in tatters, Africa was being pillaged. Asia was rising and falling like the eastern sea. And the Americans…. Well, isolation was having mixed results now, wasn’t it?

Lucifer and Michael were having their own problems. Raphael was leading a garrison into the gates of hell. And Gabriel, who had been living in the forests of Brazil

He needed to escape.

Kind of a dick move, if he were to be honest. But in complete and utter honesty, any move made by an angel could in fact be interpreted as a “dick move”.

Angel radio was going wild. The air raid sirens, the bombs, the screams of men dying in the Sahara, and the Crimea, and China, and Germany…. It echoed, reverberated, through.

It had gotten dire. Michael had come last night

“We need you in Berlin.”

“Why? What’s going on?”

“It’s time.”

Time.

Time for the Reckoning. The Rapture. Judgement Day.

They were waiting for him. To blow his horn and summon the end of it all.

And it hadn’t even been ten minutes since he’d been in bed with a Brazilian girl by the name of Camila. Or maybe Carmella.

He stood there, holding the _shofar._

_Blow, Gabriel, Blow_ was running through his head.

Cole Porter could go suck a dick.

Gabriel was the only one who could herald the apocalypse.

It was fate. Destiny. Michael and Lucifer would bring about the end of it all, but only Gabriel could call it.

He’d always throw out sarcastic song choices.

He’d taken up the French horn just to fuck with his family. He’d played trombone in a ska band in New Orleans, he’d played trumpet with Louis Armstrong and the big bands of the jazz age. He’d bust out _Take On Me_ or _La Cucaracha_ at family meetings. He’d followed Raphael around, playing _Never Gonna Give You Up_ for a solid six months of human time.

“It’s a terrible privilege,” his father said.

Gabriel had scoffed.

But now, the terrible part of that privilege was making itself known.

Fuck.

He put the ram’s horn in his pocket, and zapped himself away, bidding adieu to Constancia asleep in the bed.

_Dad-damn._ Sweden was a lot colder than Brazil.

Fortunately, there was someone who owed him a favor.

He found him in an abandoned cabin near Lake Tornetrask. 

“Loki,” he said, dipping his head before the god of mischief.

“Gabriel,” the god said. “I thought you’d be preoccupied with the apocalypse. And here you are, on my doorstep to beg for favors.”

“Funny,” Gabriel snapped. “I thought you’d be busy defending your people from the Nazis. And yet, here we both are.”

The god’s eyebrows furrowed into a dangerous arch. “Sweden is---”

“I can’t judge, buck-o. I’m on the lam, too. Time to cash in that favor.”

“What kind of favor?”

“The witness protection, evade the apocalypse, die another day, kind.”

“Odin’s beard, what have you gotten tangled up in?”

“Brother troubles,” he replied. “I trust you understand.”

Loki grimaced. “Indeed.”

"So," Gabriel said, taking a seat across from the god. "You have any brilliant ideas?"

Loki scoffed. "Of course. My proposition is this: You take my own identity, as an alias.”

“You want me to be the god of mischief? Silver-tongued lie-smith?”

“Not the words I’d use,” the god drawled, twirling a lollipop with his pinkie. “But essentially.”

“What’s in it for you?”

“I get out. I’ve been looking for a way out of this gig since the Mistletoe Incident. Most of us have. Hel, Dionysus ran off to New York. Rhiannon left centuries ago. Kartikeya and Ganesh moved back in with their parents. Nobody’s heard from Maui. Khonsu changed after he got involved with that Bast chick. The muses retreated to Olympus, Kali’s gone rogue, and Kokopelli’s always been a bit odd. Erzulie Freda hasn’t left Haiti since the 1700s. There’s nobody left, Gabriel. The old gang has moved on.”

He hadn’t realized they’d gone. He’d wondered if they were avoiding him after he won the bets on the chariot races in Pompeii.

But they’d all just left.

“I don’t want this life any more, Gabe,” the trickster was saying. “I can only foil Thor’s plans for so long, you know? I think it’s time I step down.”

_No,_ Gabriel wanted to say. _The world needs you. We need you. Don’t you see what’s happening in Europe?_

“That’s why you’ve retreated to Sweden,” is what he really said. “Because you’re abandoning your people.”

“They left _us,_ Gabriel. Not the other way around. Monotheism is the opiate of the masses.”

“Yeah, it’s changed since the good ol’ days, but we can still---”

“This is your shot, archangel. Take it or don’t.”

It was silent, but for the howling northern wind.

“I’m in.”

⛥⛥⛥

“Loki?” Dean asked. “Like, fifth best Marvel Villain Loki?”

“I’m sorry, who’s one through four?”

"And why were you in Sweden?"

"Don't knock Sweden," Dean snapped.

Sam looked up. "What the  _hell_ do you know about Sweden?"

"IKEA. Meatballs. Metallica."

"ABBA," Gabriel interjected, a faraway look in his eye.

"Great for porn."

"Right?"

Sam looked like he wanted to bash his head in. Or better yet, take Dean and Gabriel and bash _their_ heads together.

Dean and Gabriel, as it were, had already diverted their conversation to discuss the character arcs of Doc Ock versus Red Skull.

This was shaping up to be a very long night.

⛥⛥⛥

 

“Well, well, well,” said a voice. “If it isn’t everyone’s favorite baby archangel?”

“Jesus.”

“Guess again.”

“Is this hell? Is this my punishment?”

“No no no, dearie. Angels don’t go to hell.”

“Where… where is this?”

“Nowhere.”

“The Empty. I’m in the Empty. Which makes you…”

“You. But with a bit more pizzaz.”

“So you’re the doppelganger  bridge troll to Angel-Hell. But you’re supposed to be sleeping.”

“Oh-ho, right you are, boy-o! And here you are! So here I am! I don’t sleep until you surrender, buck-o.”

“That sucks. I wasn’t planning on surrender.”

“And just what were you planning on doing?”

“Busting out.”

“You can’t get out unless I permit it. Which will never happen. You see, I can’t die. I have overpowered many an angel, time and time again. I will always win. Three archangels down, one more squiggling and squorming in my grasp.”

“That would be correct.”

“Indeed it is!”

“But you’re also very exhausted. You can’t die, but you can’t sleep until I go gently into that good fucking night.”

“Pardon?”

“Hate to be the bearer of bad news, but you missed that memo: being around me? It’s kind of like being waterboarded to the ten-hour _Nyan Cat Theme_. Good luck. Greater beings have tried… and failed.”

Annoy himself outta death. The same way he annoyed his way here.

Hell, he’d annoyed Dean Winchester to death and back to life for six straight months.

Gabriel had this one in the bag.

Somehow, no one was even surprised when he strolled out of the darkness, playing the Soviet National Anthem on his slighty bent kazoo.

What a wonderful world.


End file.
